This semi-autobiographical work by Pierre Loti (1850-1923) -- subtitled A Novel About Contemporary Turkish Harems -- was published in 1906. I don't think there has been an English translation.

The story starts in 1901, when Andre Lhery, a French novelist-cum-diplomat, receives a letter from a 22-year-old Turkish woman who voices admiration for his work, and (old line) claims to understand him as no-one else does. The letter-writer, who lives in Istanbul, expresses herself beautifully in French, and is clearly well educated. But the twist is that she lives in a harem (the female section of a household, whose inhabitants are strictly surveilled and closely confined). And she is on the point of being married to someone she has never met.

Lhery has had a previous connection with "Stamboul". He loves the city, and not only loved -- though the circumstances are not clarified -- a young woman from a harem (now dead), but also, about 15 years before this novel opens, wrote a book about this "adventure".

This, of course, is all very reminiscent of Loti's own life. His first book, Aziyade, was published in 1879, and is also semi-autobiographical. He did indeed have an illicit love affair with an 18-year-old "Circassian" woman who resided in a harem. And yes, it would have made sense to read Aziyade before I read this. But anyway...

The Disenchanted is also based on a real-life set of circumstances involving Loti. What he experienced, though, wasn't actually quite what he thought it was... More on that in a minute.


Istanbul, 2022

Lhery, again like Loti, has been a bit of a wanderer. Having received that intriguing letter, he "felt once again the irremediable pain of having scattered himself among all the peoples, of having been a nomad all over the earth, attaching his heart here and there. My God, why did he now have to have two homelands: his own, and then the other, his eastern homeland?" I definitely empathize with that feeling. The rich variety in a life can come at the cost of heartache and confusion...

Anyway, Lhery writes back. Three years later, he returns to Istanbul on some diplomatic mission. And thus begins a protracted relationship with Djenane and two of her cousins. They have chaste but dangerous clandestine meetings; the women are almost always fully veiled (they're described as "black phantoms", "three little black shadows"); and bit by bit he and Djenane start to love each other. There is no possible resolution of this dilemma, however. Djenane, having divorced her first husband, is now required to remarry him. In any case, a marriage with this foreigner would be unthinkable. There is no way out. So she commits suicide. Of her two cousin-companions, one dies, and the other has little life expectancy either (consumption, we assume).

Early in their relationship, the three women commission Lhery to write a book about the plight of harem-enclosed women. They contribute ideas for the story. Djenane wants a tale that matches very closely the reality of what is going on. Her ideas are realistic and, as it turns out, prophetic: "[I would make the hero] an artist, who is amused by new and unusual impressions. He therefore accepts successive interviews, because they are dangerous and novel. And what can happen if not love? But in her, not in him. He is only a dilettante, and sees in the whole thing only an adventure... My heroine is too proud to follow the stranger. So she will die, not directly because of this man, but rather, if you like, from the inflexible demands of the harem, which do not leave her any way to console herself for her love and her dream by means of action."

The title of the book contains a double meaning that doesn't quite come across in English. These young harem women are definitely disenchanted -- disillusioned -- with the closely guarded lives they lead. They feel like prisoners. But their plight is exacerbated because they have been disenchanted -- in the sense that a spell has been lifted -- by education. They read and speak not only Turkish, but French, German, English, and Italian. So they know far more than their forebears about the alternative life out there, and they thirst for it.



As I pointed out above, Loti was unaware that it was a brazen bit of trickery that underpinned the book's origins. Two young Turkish women, Zennour et Nourye Noury-Bey (daughters of one of the sultan's ministers, and granddaughters of a Frenchman who had converted to Islam, and established himself in the Ottoman Empire), had read Aziyade. And they loved Loti. Then they encountered French journalist and feminist Marie Lera (real name Hortense Marie Heliard, alternative pen name Marc Helys). With Lera as the ringleader, the women dreamt up a strategy to persuade Loti to write a sequel to Aziyade. In 1904 and 1905, they donned veils, and regularly held clandestine meetings with the French author.

In 1933, 10 years after Loti's death, Lera wrote about her stunt in Le Figaro. She says it wasn't a deception... Turkish women, she writes, were obsessed with Loti. But he lived a withdrawn life on board the Vautour (the embassy-assigned ship under his command). This is why she and two young Turkish women decided to take measures to draw him out. He is moved by the encounter they organize, and asks them whether he will see them again. They feel a bit bad on the way home. They just intended a bit of fun, whereas he was sincere... So they decide to "make him live a novel". They set up meetings, choosing beautiful and evocative sites. They try hard to amplify the mystery that intrigued him so much. The fact that he can't see their faces enables them to be bolder: "We questioned him especially about his heart, and he answered us with great simplicity, astonished to find himself moving so easily to confidences. 'Without your veils,' he told us one day, 'I could not speak to you like this.'"

The women start by wanting to educate him. They progress towards wanting him to let the world know about the paradoxical and painful situation young Turkish women were experiencing. He demurs. But they persist. They want him to write a novel about Muslims that the world would find moving, and they saw themselves as his living documentation.

Marie Lera is the Djenane of the novel. According to Etienne de Montety, Lera eventually invents the death of the character she herself invented... Loti even received a very official-looking death announcement. Lera's two accomplices decide to leave the Ottoman Empire (it was highly unusual for Muslim women to leave their faith community). Their flight is reported in the newspapers, and became "a wildly romantic story for a French elite nourished on Orientalist novels".

I can't decide whether this terrible deception served Loti right, or was really horribly heartless...



Whatever our judgement on that, the novel was very successful, and made the position of women in the harems a topic of conversation. And the inadvertent postmodernism of the fiction within the fiction within the fiction is undeniably intriguing.

But I didn't love this book.

Structurally, I felt it didn't work. The tension builds in bursts, so that you constantly feel as though someone is manipulating you -- tugging at your heartstrings only to let them go, and then tug a bit harder later.

Loti's narrator doesn't seem to have much awareness of female experience in his own society. His Turkish interlocutors, for example, have a wildly erroneous view of the life of European women, which Lhery does nothing to correct. Djenane talks blithely of "the radiance of the Latin women", and adds: "How happy, in your countries, was this creature whom people have for centuries thought about, and fought and suffered for; who could freely love and choose, and who had the right to stipulate that she would give herself only to someone deserving." We don't hear Lhery pushing back against this idealism. Did Loti really believe that was universally the lot of Western women?

It's true that Loti excels at beautiful, atmospheric description. He is good at the mournful, elegiac, nostalgic, and wistful -- and he lays it on with a trowel. So we have the end of the season, the end of his diplomatic career, the end of his will-o'-the-wisp relationship with Djenane, his contemplation of old age -- all blending into one lament that (aging myself) I can't help but find resonant.

But Loti loves "Stamboul" at least in part BECAUSE of its melancholy, ruin, and decay -- a classic orientalist stereotype. Hacer Esra Almas comments on the contradictions of Loti's stance. On the one hand, he identifies with the Turks, and is sympathetic towards them. On the other, "Loti's fascination with local color and decay to the point of complete disregard of all modernizing efforts added an ambivalent tone to his rhetoric... The celebrated poet Nazim Hikmet famously called Loti a charlatan..., contending that the Orient as Loti depicted it is a figment of imagination only: it has 'never been, neither yesterday, nor today, nor tomorrow'."

Even the melancholic Orhan Pamuk, writing in Istanbul: Memories and the City, gets cross with Loti: "When Western observers rubbish the city, I often find myself in agreement, taking more pleasure in their cold-blooded candour than in the condescending admiration of Pierre Loti, forever going on about Istanbul's beauty, strangeness and wondrous uniqueness."



Loti also comes across as pretty racist with regard to everyone except the Turks... "Levantines" (Armenians, Greeks, or Jews) definitely get the rough edge of his tongue.

And the I-figure is annoyingly self-obsessed... He must have realized the young women, particularly Djenane, were becoming unhealthily bound up with him, and yet his main concern is that they might find he looks old... Surely an early distancing manoeuvre would have been the kindest and most sensible thing? Always lurking in the background is the unconsciously unpleasant leer of the older man towards the younger woman, even in scenes that are meant to be solemn and evocative: "Oh, the rhythmic softness, the gently rocking measure of these prayers of Islam, especially when spoken by a young girl's lips under a thick veil..." Seriously?

Yet Loti has a genuine respect for the core of Islam. He lauds the rituals and (generally speaking) the way Turkish society is run. And he is careful to distinguish between the treatment of Ottoman harem women and the actual teachings of Islam.

To his credit, he also avoids taking us down a super-melodramatic route. He doesn't abduct Djenane, and she doesn't turn out to be his daughter (I was wondering, I have to confess...). So the novel ends on a sad note, rather than a silly one.



Loti... He's a conundrum really. It's many years since I read An Iceland Fisherman (1886) and Sailor (1893), and although I enjoyed them at the time, I wonder how I would feel about them now. In Madame Chrysantheme (1887) and The Last Days of Pekin (1902), his orientalism is on sickeningly brash display.

But, argues Peter Turberfield, for all his Orientalism and exoticism, Loti espouses a "very real anti-colonial sentiment". And certainly, Angkor Pilgrim (1912), which I read in 2010, reflects a pronounced scepticism about empires and their doings.

So I will persist with Loti's Turkish works, as they offer plenty of food for thought. To come, then, are Aziyade (1879), Phantom of the Orient (1892), and Turkey in Agony (1913)...